Class 13 - Romantic Era I

Giacomo Puccini (1856-1924): Brief Biography

Puccini was born in Lucca (Italy), a member of a large family of musicians going back to the early 18th century. His first job, at age 14, was as organist to the two churches of Lucca; but he quickly became more interested in opera (especially Verdi) than church music. He studied at the musical conservatory in Milan (1880-83), and there he came into contact with a group of Milanese artists, called the Scapigliati, who lived the Bohemian lifestyle. This group included the great librettist Arrigo Boito (himself a composer whose opera Mefistofele is still popular today).

Puccini wrote his first opera, Le villi (willi were vampire-like witches in East-European legend), a "dramatic legend," in 1884. It was successful, and was played at the La Scala opera house in Milan the next year. His second opera, Edgar, a "lyric drama" (1889), was a failure; his third, Manon Lescaut (1893), which story Massenet had set with international acclaim in 1884, was reasonably well received, and most importantly established him on the international operatic scene. (The work begins in Amiens (France), moves to Le Havre, and finishes up in the "Louisiana desert"!)

La Bohème (1896) was at first less successful than Manon Lescaut, perhaps because its subject was too realistic, its tone in many places too light-hearted and somewhat sentimental, and was thus compared unfavorably by the critics (see below) to the Romantic-tragic character of Manon. However, it came to be recognized as the masterpiece history now judges it to be.

In 1900 he produced Tosca, a work portraying brutality, sadism, and searing emotions-- his first attempt at "realist" opera (verismo)-- to tremendous public acclaim. His next opera, in 1904, Madama Butterfly, was centered upon a marriage in Japan, entered into in all sincerity by a geisha girl and callously by an U.S. Naval lieutenant, with devastating consequences to which we are perhaps more attuned in our post-colonial age. Its first performance on Feb 17 was a fiasco with the audience jeering and calling out sarcastic comments. Puccini withdrew the work and revised it, for its second première on May 28, 1904.

After these two productions, Puccini was embroiled in a domestic crisis and scandalous court case in 1909. Puccini's jealous wife accused him of having had an intimate affair with his servant girl, Doria, who in 1909 committed suicide. From the autopsy evidence, Doria and Puccini were exonerated, but the experience took its toll on the very sensitive omposer.

In 1907, he composed The Girl of the Golden West, a very different sort of opera, set in California during the gold rush era, which was successfully premiered at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1910. Soon after this, Puccini began to be criticized by a new generation of Italian composers for his "bourgeois mentality, lack of ideals, and pure commercialism" (New Grove) -- charges which in some quarters still haunt him at the present day. Joseph Kerman, for example, in his book Opera as Drama (1956), spoke of Tosca as "that shabby little shocker."

His final opera, the lavish, exotic, fairy-tale Turandot, was unfinished at his death in 1924, but was completed and premiered in 1926, and remains one of his most admired works.

La Bohème, Puccini (1896)

Listen to the first 45 minutes

From MET notes:

“The libretto sets the action in Paris, circa 1830. This is not a random setting, but rather reflects the issues and concerns of a particular time and place. After the upheavals of revolution and war, French artists had lost their traditional support base of aristocracy and church and were desperate for new sources of income. The rising bourgeoisie took up the burden of patronizing artists and earned their contempt in return. The story, then, centers on self-conscious youth at odds with mainstream society, feeling themselves morally superior to the rules of the bourgeois (specifically regarding sexual mores) and expressing their independence with affectations of speech and dress. The Bohemian ambience of this opera is clearly recognizable in any modern urban center. La Bohème captures this ethos in its earliest days.”

Class 14 - Romantic Era II

Die Winterreise is a cycle of twenty-four songs for voice and piano in the form of a two-part collection of twelve songs each, all setting poems by Wilhelm Müller. The Winterreise is an unusually somber and dark song cycle, contrasting Schubert's other song cycles and the majority of contemporaneous works. This depressive mood may relate to the season mentioned in the title; Schubert is portraying Winter. The dark tone may also relate in an autobiographical sense: these songs were Schubert's last composition and he completed the set while dying of syphilis.

As you listen consider the role of the piano versus the role of the singer. Is one part more important than the other or are they of equal focus? Pay attention to the poetry and consider how the meaning of the text is influencing the musical setting.

As a stranger I arrived,
As a stranger again I leave.
May was kind to me
With many bunches of flowers.
The girl spoke of love,
Her mother even of marriage, -
Now the world is bleak,
The path covered by snow.
I cannot choose the time
Of my departure;
I must find my own way
In this darkness.
With a shadow cast by the moonlight
As my traveling companion
I'll search for animal tracks
On the white fields.
Why should I linger, waiting
Until I am driven out?
Let stray dogs howl
Outside their master's house;
Love loves to wander
God has made her so
From one to the other.
Dear love, good night!
I will not disturb you in your dreaming,
It would be a pity to disturb your rest;
You shall not hear my footsteps
Softly, softly shut the door!
On my way out I'll write
"Good Night" on the gate,
So that you may see
That I have thought of you.

The wind plays with the weathervaneOn my lovely darling's house.And I thought in my delusion,That it mocked the poor fugitive.He should have noticed soonerThe symbol displayed on the house,So he wouldn't ever have expectedTo find a faithful woman within.The wind plays with the hearts insideAs it does on the roof, only not so loudly.Why should they care about my grief ?Their child is a rich bride.

At the well by the gateThere stands a linden tree;I dreamed in its shadowMany a sweet dream.I carved in its barkMany a word of love;In joy and in sorrowI was always drawn to it.Again today I had to travelPast it in the depths of night.There even in the darknessI closed my eyes.And its branches rustled,As if they called to me:Come here to me, friend,Here you'll find peace !The cold winds blewRight into my face;The hat flew off my head,I didn't turn around.Now I am many hoursDistant from that place,And I still hear it whispering:You'd find peace here !

Over there beyond the villageStands an organ-grinder,And with numb fingersHe plays as best he can.Barefoot on the ice,He totters here and there,And his little plateIs always empty.No one listens to him,No one notices him,And the dogs growlAround the old man.And he just lets it happen,As it will,Plays, and his hurdy-gurdyIs never still.Strange old man,Shall I go with you ?Will you play your organTo my songs

A complete recording of all twenty-four song may be found here (optional).

Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe (1840): I - Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai

The title, Dichterliebe, literally translates to "poet's love," and this song cycle sets a series of love songs by Heinriche Heine from 1822. Robert Schumann wrote these poems while seperated from his beloved, Clara Schumann, a talented pianist and composer. This set is known for its sensitivity and affectation, expressing a dreamlike quality. Listen especially closely to how the songs begin and end - do they feel complete? Why might the composer have left things unresolved? Consider what you know about romanticism in general and the themes that are often explored.

In the glorious month of May,As all the buds were breaking,Then in my heartLove bloomed.In the glorious month of May,As all the birds were singing,Then I revealed to herMy longing and desire.

I bear no grudge, even as my heart is breaking,eternally lost love! I bear no grudge.Even though you shine in diamond splendor,there falls no light into your heart's night,

that I've known for a long time.I bear no grudge, even as my heart is breaking. I saw you, truly, in my dreams,and saw the night in your heart's cavity,and saw the serpent that feeds on your heart,I saw, my love, how very miserable you are.I bear no grudge.

The final song of the cycle changes tone and directly addresses the listener.

The nasty old songs,The black, bitter dreams,Let’s bury them now,Fetch an enormous casket.I’ll lay some things to rest there,But I won’t say what just yet;The coffin will have to be biggerThan the Heidelberger cask.And fetch me a catafalque,And thick solid planks;They need to be longerThan the bridge at Mainz.And fetch twelve giants, too,They have to be strongerThan Saint Christopher in theCathedral in Cologne on the Rhine.They must carry the casket away,And sink it down into the sea;Because such an immense casketRequires an immense grave.Do you know why the coffinNeeds to be so big and heavy?I laid away my love in itAnd my pain as well.

Clara Schumann (1819-1896) was among the most distinguished pianists of the romantic era. Although she pursued composition as a secondary activity to performing, she is known for a small body of exceptional songs and piano music.

Clara Schumann's three songs (opus 12) were originally included in her husband, Robert Schumann's, Liebesfrühling from 1841. The first song, Er Ist Gekommen In Sturm Und Regen (He cam in the storm and rain), is a great example of the Romantic theme of passionate love (leidenschaftlich ).

Listen to how the piano part accomplishes word painting and comments on the text as it is sung. The form of the songs is AAB, although the same text begins each verse. How does the setting and mood change in the third and final verse?

Class 15 - Romantic Era III

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a revolutionary in both politics and music. While we will mostly focus on his music, it is difficult to completely separate out the art from the artist. Wagner was a kappellmeister until the early 1840s in a number of different opera houses, conducting the entire repertoire of opera from Mozart to his Italian contemporaries. In the 1940s he settled in Dresden, where he continued to work as a conductor and compose. In Dresden he became more an more involved in a form of extreme left wing politics with a group of socialist nationalist revolutionaries. His political involvements soon sent him into exile, first in Paris and then in Switzerland. While in exhile he wrote many essays on music, calling for a total rethinking of opera and music in general that would realize his idea of a total artwork (gesampkunstwerk) that would bring together all of the arts and return art to the people (volk). Wagner wrote opera almost exclusively, almost entirely on a grand scale, with his magnum opus, The Ring Cycle, a set of four operas, each several hours in length.

Wagner was the first composer to write his own libretti, focusing on internal rhymes and alliteration to create a more flowing structure for the words. Wagner dubbed this approach Stabreim. Wagner needed his own style of flowing prose so that he could achieve his goals musically, where instead of clear and separate musical themes and phrases there is a series of long musical arches, elided and connected smoothly. Wagner called this approach to musical phrase as "poetic musical period," though her never specified exactly what defined this term.

Wagner's ideals amounted to a total reinvention of opera, reoriented towards his philosophy on music and art. Wagner even went so far as to design the ideal opera house, which was built in Bayreuth in 1882. Wagner's theories on opera and gesamptkunstwerk were most fully realized in his Ring Cycle, which was first performed at the inaugural Bayreuth festival in 1882, a festival of Wagner's music that is held annually and continues to this day.

Discussing Wagner brings the question of if we should honor great artists who are deeply flawed on a personal level. Wagner was outwardly antisemitic and even wrote an essay entitled "Jewishness in Music." His music and thought was highly nationalistic and was later championed by Hitler and the Nazis, his political and artistic ideals fitting perfectly with the Nazi movement as a believer of racialist ideas and the Aryan master mace.

Tristan und Isolde is based on a work by a medieval courtly Germanic writer Gottfried von Strassburg in the 12th century. This first version of Tristan relates back even further to an old french legend and then even further back, originally from Celtic origins.

Tristan und Isolde was greatly influenced by the writings of Arthur Shopenhauer and his philosophy of pessimism, viewing life as longing and striving. For Shopenhauer, the perception of art would allow for temporary transcendence of daily life. This opera is a reification in art of Schopenhauer's understanding of life as constant unfulfilled striving.

The Liebestod is the climax of the opera, a portrayal of ecstacy that is difficult to match. Wagner writes:

"The exhausted heart sinks back, to pine away in a longing that can never attain its end, since each attainment brings in its wake only renewed desire, till in final exhaustion the breaking eye catches a glimpse of the attainment of the highest bliss—the bliss of dying, of ceasing to be, of final redemption into that wondrous realm from which we only stray the further the more we struggle to enter it by force. Shall we call it Death? Or is it not the wonder-world of Night, whence, as the story tells, an ivy and a vine spring of old in inseparable embrace from the graves of Tristan and Isolde?”

We will be limiting our discussion to the first and fourth movements of this symphony. The second and third movements are included below for your listening enjoyment!

Brahms is included here as a contrast to Wagner. The two composers are often considered as representatives of opposite camps, Wagner writing program music and Brahms writing absolute music. Program music is defined by the idea that the music is serving or expressing some sort of extramusical content, like an opera of symphonic poem that relates to a definite story. On the other hand, absolute music is music that has no explicit extramusical content. Like Wagner, Brahms looked back at Beethoven as the model for truly great music and art, but his interpretation was very different as Brahms embodies the principals of compositional integrity, logic, and historical consciousness first and foremost, treating music in absolute terms, as a non-symbolic art form.

The first movement is in Sonata form. Brahms breaks with the traditional form somewhat as he does not repeat the exposition and by doing so encourages a more continuous and flowing musical structure.

The fourth movement is a rare example of a symphonic passacaglia, As another example of Brahms' technical wizardry, he superimposes a sonata-form-like structure on top of the passacaglia, giving the impression of sonata form without actually using it.

Class 16 - Romantic Era IV

Mahler's second symphony was written over six years from 1888 to 1894. The first movement, Totenfeier (funeral rites), was originally a standalone piece that was then expanded into an entire symphony. Mahler's music represents the height of the symphony as a genre, expanded from humble beginning with Haydn to the epic Mahlerian proportions of duration and instrumentation. The second symphony of Mahler lasts approximately 90 minutes and is scored for:

It's hard to appreciate the difference in sonic weight between the Haydn orchestra and the Mahler orchestra through a recording. A recording will always be normalized in volume, so the sheer decibel level of the Mahler orchestra compared to the Haydn orchestra is lost in translation. What a recording is able to do is portray the increased timbral thickness of Mahler as well as the range of orchestration as Mahler will move between the entire orchestra playing together in a tutti to a small subset of instruments depending on what he is trying to do with the music.

Once again, we will be focusing on the first movement and the finale. I would recommend listening to the entire work, it is very dramatic and powerful when experiencing the entire arc of the music and sense of narrative that transverses through all five movements.

Mahler follows a modified sonata form in the first movement where the exposition is varied upon repetition. The music itself is concerned with the binary relationships of death and life, light and darkness, hope and despair. The musical mood seems to fluctuate, suggesting a cycle of death and rebirth. The theme itself sounds like a funeral march and there are also several musical references to the Dies Irae plainchant, symbolizing death, in the development section.

The second movement includes quotation and allusion to folk music, something Mahler is well known for, the symphony for him being something that can include almost everything and contains a wide breadth of expressive possibilities and topics.

This scherzo begins with an iconic moment where two notes are abruptly stuck on the timpani. This scherzo includes references to klezmer (traditional Jewish) music and follows the Wunderhorn legend (see below). This movement contains the infamous "death schriek" or "cry of despair" moment at the very end of the movement.

The brief fourth movement continues seamlessly into the finale. Like Beethoven's ninth symphony, voices are added to the instruments of the orchestra in the fourth movement and finale. The fourth movement sets text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a kind of German folk legend. The final movement sets some text from Die Auferstehung by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock combined with Mahler's own original prose.

Primeval LightO little red rose!Man lies in greatest need!Man lies in greatest pain!How I would rather be in heaven.There came I upon a broad pathwhen came a little angel and wanted to turn me away.Ah no! I would not let myself be turned away!I am from God and shall return to God!The loving God will grant me a little light,Which will light me into that eternal blissful life!

Rise again, yes, rise again,Will you My dust,After a brief rest!Immortal life! Immortal lifeWill He who called you, give you.To bloom again were you sown!The Lord of the harvest goesAnd gathers in, like sheaves,Us together, who died.—Friedrich Klopstock

O believe, my heart, O believe:Nothing to you is lost!Yours is, yes yours, is what you desiredYours, what you have lovedWhat you have fought for!O believe,You were not born for nothing!Have not for nothing, lived, suffered!What was createdMust perish,What perished, rise again!Cease from trembling!Prepare yourself to live!O Pain, You piercer of all things,From you, I have been wrested!O Death, You conqueror of all things,Now, are you conquered!With wings which I have won for myself,In love’s fierce striving,I shall soar upwardsTo the light which no eye has penetrated!Die shall I in order to live.Rise again, yes, rise again,Will you, my heart, in an instant!That for which you suffered,To God shall it carry you!—Gustav Mahler

Strauss, Metamorphosen (1945)

In many ways, this work is an elegy to romanticism and the Germanic artistic legacy that the Nazis corrupted beyond repair. Strauss is well known for his ability to depict stories and images through instrumental means, and in this work he explores rhetorical devices to evoke pain and horror. Like the first movement on the Mahler second symphony, there seems to be an alternation between hope and sorrow that runs through this piece.

Towards the end of the work, Strauss quotes Beethoven's Eroica Symphony and writes the words "In Memoriam!" above it. Allusions to the famous theme from Beethoven's fifth symphony are also present in the work.

Strauss wrote in his diary just after completing this work: "The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany's 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom".

A handy timeline from the Listen book:

Class 17 - Impressionism and Expressionism

As we enter the twentieth century we immediately discover many new paths in music history. One notable movement originates from a collection of French composers, Debussy the best known among them, called impressionism. Please see the excerpt below for a brief introduction:

Debussy, prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894)

This piece captures the essence of impressionism in music with it's ambiguous sounding harmony and lush orchestral profile. The music is based on a poem by Mallarmé entitled The Afternoon of a Faun. The music begins with a solo flute, listen for where you expect the flute melody to go and how the melody meets or defies your expectations. The form of the music is almost formless, with themes blending into one another. The music treats dynamics very fluidly as well, almost everything swelling in and out of the music. The result is a very fluid and sensuous sound.

La Mer is an orchestral work by Debussy from about ten years after the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. This piece takes inspiration from Japanese visual art and music, specifically the court music of Gagaku. The cover of the original printing of the score included a version of Hokusai's Wave.

Class 18 - Early 20th Century I

Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps (1913)

The first 6 minutes is a short documentary on the work, which has interviews with two of the dancers from Ballet Russes. Watch this documentary portion and then proceed to the listen to the piece in the other recording below that is divided into parts.

The Rite of Spring does not have movements in a conventional sense, but it divided up into sections like scenes in an opera. The recording is split up into 4 parts below with a play-by-play description of the sections on the left side. The sections are generally short, ranging between 30 seconds to 5 minutes.

Part I: Adoration of the Earth

Introduction (1st video, 0:00)- Begins with a bassoon solo in a very high register.- Various woodwinds are added, each playing different folk-music-inspired solos.- The winds build up and overlap to a climax, cutting away suddenly and returning to the solo bassoon.

Augurs of Spring (2nd video, 0:00)- The infamous Rite of Spring chord begins with pounding regularity with irregular accents.- Short motives are interspersed and alternated with the dissonant repeated Rite of Spring chord.- Builds to a huge climax that is cut off by a drum.

Ritual of Abduction (2nd video, 3:15)- Quick and wild in character.- Brass and winds perform with special techniques that create unusual sounds.- Lots of insistant percussion hits cutting the music into blocks.- Sudden cut-off to reveal the clarinet trill and flute melody that leads into the following section.

Spring Rounds (2nd video, 5:00)- Begiuns with a dark and mysterious dance-like accompaniment in the lower registers of the orchestra.- The first relaxed and pastoral section with lyrical melodies.- The calm and beautiful music is cut off suddenly by a cymbal crash and a loud series of parralel chords.

Ritual of the Rival Tribes (2nd video, 8:05)- Begins with a big drum beat and proceeds into a fast and wild section.- Call and response between the percussion and brass sections.- As the section concludes it slows down towards the following section.

Procession of the Sage (2nd video, 10:00)- Slow music performed by brass and percussion while they gradually grow louder.

Kiss of the Earth (2nd video, 10:50)- Previous section ends with a sudden cutoff of the loud brass processional to reveal an ethereal layer of string harmonics.- very short moment where the sage kisses the earth in the ballet.

Dance of the Earth (2nd video, 11:00)- Extremely fast tempo with sudden changes in orchestration.- Sudden cutaway to build up one last time.

Part II: The Sacrifice

Introduction (1st video, 0:00)- Strange descending like and a repeated dark chord begins the second part of the Rite.- As the chords and strange flute lines continue, simple melodies in the winds and violins emerge.- The remainder of the section is generally soft and focuses on muted brass instruments, particularly the trumpets.

Mystic Circles of the Young Girls (1st video, 4:00)- The music picks up in tempo and focuses on the strings, with parralel chords accompanied by plucking (pizzicatti).- New melodies emerge, with strange and dissonant doublings.- Horns and strings then pass melodies back and forth.- Towards the end, two powerful and loud chords interupt the music building up into the following section.

Glorification of the Chosen One (2nd video, 0:00)- Repeated drumbeat and chords pound relentlessly in a way similar to the "Augurs" section from part I. - The beat become more wild and irregular.- End with a deep low bass clarinet note.

Evocation of the Ancestors (2nd video, 1:50)- A short and loud section with wild brass, almost sounding like a big band.

Ritual Action of the Ancestors (2nd video, 2:15)- Plucked string and tambourine accompaniment.- Various explosives sections alternate with slower and quieter music.- returns to music similar to the very beginning of part I before...

Sacrificial Dance (2nd video, 5:40)- Sudden introduction of loud string chords- Very rhythmically irregular and unpreditable.- Towards the end, a rising flute line depicts the spirit leaving the body of the sacrifice and then the music suddenly ends with a loud and dissonant chord.

Some of the musical materials in this work are derived from Russian and Ukrainian folk music. Bela Bartok, a contemporaneous composer to Stravinsky and perhaps the first ethnomusicologist writes:

"Stravinsky never mentions the sources of his themes. Neither in his titles nor in the footnotes does e ever allude to whether a theme of his is his own invention or wherther it is taken over from folk music... Stravinsky apparently takes this course deliberately. He wants to demonstrate that it does not matter a jot whether a composer invents his own themes of uses themes from elsewhere. He has the right to use musical material taken from all sources... lacking any data I am unable to tell which themes o Stravinsky's in his so-calle "Russian" period are hs own inventions and which are borrowed from folk music. This much is certain, that if among the thematic material of Stravinksy's there are some of his own invention... these are the most faithful and clever imitation of folk songs."

and goes on to add:

"[in] Le Sacre du Printemps onward, he seldom uses melodies of a closed form consisting of three or four lines, but short motives of two or three measures, and repeats them "a la ostinato." These short recurring primitive motives are very characteristic of Russian music of a certain category. "

Class 19 - Early 20th Century II

Charles Ives (1874-1954) was an influential American composer working in the first half of the 20th century. Like Mahler, he often included intertextual elements (quotation, allusion, reference to other pieces of music). Unlike Mahler, these intertextual elements come together to provide the impression of a collage style rather than an organic, synthesized piece of music. That is to say, in Ives there is often the sense of multiple pieces of music happening simultaneously without regards to one another.

Ives' father with a bandleader for marching bands and a curious musician with a penchant for experimentation. As a child, Charles Ives was able to hear his fathers experiments, which included a time when he arranged for two marching bands to cross paths while playing completely different tunes. The elder Ives also reportedly designed an instrument that could play quartertones (intervals smaller than the smallest interval on a piano, or imagine if a piano had 24 notes per octave instead of 12).

Ives is known as a particularly unique composer, setting a common ideal for American composers to this day as artists who strike out on their own and do not follow the trends of Europe and academia. In fact, Ives is so particular that it's possible to explore his music from a variety of stances as people try to guess where his strange music originates. There are some musicologists who see close relationships between Ives' harmonic language and the atonality of Schoenberg, though the two were not aware of one another until well after their styles and techniques were set. It is equally possible to understand Ives' dissonant musical language in terms of a collage and mixture between more familiar musical materials of both the classical tradition and Americana.

Ives knew that his challenging music would not be financially successful, so he followed a lucrative career in the insurance industry while composing on the side. This meant that he was free to maintain his artistic ideals without financial consideration, resulting in this unique and idiosyncratic music.

Ives, The Unanswered Question (1908/1935)

In this work, the trumpet poses the "question" while the woodwinds provide the "answer." It falls on us to interpret what this question might be and what the answers might represent. The strings play a chorale-like texture in the background, what might this represent?

Although there is no quotation in this music, it still gives the sense of a collage as the three basic musical elemets outlined above are performed without a sense of development.

It is interesting to note that the first version of this score was composed several years before The Rite of Spring or Pierrot Lunaire, and by any measure The Unanswered Question is just as revolutionary.

Seeger was an American modernist composer and the first woman to ever receive a Guggenheim. She was also a specialist in American Folk music, which may have influenced her famous folksinger stepson, Pete Seeger. After producing a small body of compelling compositions, her interest in folk music overshadowed her compositional interests and she abandoned modernism entirely.

Her compositions stand out as unique and remarkable for the era and still feel fresh today. Her most celebrated work is her String Quartet of 1931 where she explores a novel world of rhythm, but there are also some hidden gems from her catalog such as the "Sandburg Songs" that can be heard below.

The "Sandburg Songs" combine a sense of vernacular language with the aesthetic of modernism. The songs can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways - do you hear them as emotionally expressive in any way?

Ruth Crawford Seeger, Home Thoughts (1929)

On poems by Carl Sandberg

THE SEA rocks have a green moss.The pine rocks have red berries.I have memories of you.Speak to me of how you miss me.Tell me the hours go long and slow.Speak to me of the drag on your heart,The iron drag of the long days.I know hours empty as a beggar’s tin cup on a rainy day, empty as asoldier’s sleeve with an arm lost.Speak to me …

Ruth Crawford Seeger, White Moon (1929)

WHITE MOON comes in on a baby face.The shafts across her bed are flimmering.Out on the land White Moon shines,Shines and glimmers against gnarled shadows,All silver to slow twisted shadowsFalling across the long road that runs from the house.Keep a little of your beautyAnd some of your flimmering silverFor her by the window to-nightWhere you come in, White Moon.

Seeger's best known, and perhaps most experimental work is her String Quartet from 1931 (optional listening)

It's interesting to think about why Seeger may have abandoned modernism for folk music, and the answer may relate to the social and political zeitgeist of the depression era in the USA. Below is some optional folk music listening that provides a sense of the social and political messaging of certain folk traditions in the 30s, 40s, and beyond:

Class 20 - Electronic Music

This class marks the beginning of the post-war era and arguably the largest fundamental shift in art music. At this point, the invention of magnetic tape and the various techniques of recording, multi-tracking, splicing, and editing tape completely changed how music was conceived. Now, instead of notes, rhythms, form, and timbre, composers could work with sound itself as the basic material of music. This idea is somewhat analogous to the crisis of painting after the invention of the camera.

The idea that composers now work with sound and gesture instead of notes and rhythms will be a cornerstone of how we understand the music we listen to in the class from this point on.

Electronic music is also one answer to one of the central dilemmas of the Modernist era: what is the role of art in an inustrialized society? See the excerpt below for context:

Excerpt of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin (1936)

Pierre Schaeffer, Études aux chemines de fer (1948)

Heralding in this shift to working with sound itself was Pierre Schaeffer, the founder of musique concrète. His five etudes of noise are the first works to use recordings as a compositional resource. These pieces mark the beginning of "tape" music, which uses the recently invented technology of magnetic tape as the medium. The ability to cuts, rearrange, alter, and overlay sounds recorded on magnetic tape presented a new frontier in music.

Norman McLaren, Dots (1940)

McLaren Drrawing directly on film to create his animation (1949)

This early animation was created by the artist etching tboth the visuals and the sound directly onto the filmstrip. His aesthetic in terms of visuals and music are both quintessentially modern in their approach yet seem to have a very contemporary appeal, his music sounding like more recent electronic musicians like Autechre, Squarepusher, or other Glitch artists from the late 90s.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was an extremely important and extremely controversial German composer active from the post-war period through to his death in 2007. Listen to the first five minutes of the recording, which is part two of this large-scale piece. This version of Kontakte is scored for 4-channel surround sound with live piano and percussion.

Stockhausen, Kontakte (1960)

Kontakte is an impressive piece of early electronic music, created using synthesizers, recordings, and tape. The photo below shows how Stockhausen achieved some of the spatialization techniques, as the piece is ideally played of four speakers in a surround sound setup. This work is meticulously structured as Stockhausen was known at this time for achieving total serialization of the musical element. Serialism is a technique, first applied to pitches by Arnold Schoenberg, whereby a set of elements are arranged in a set order that is then manipulated systematically, usually with the principal of avoiding repetition of an element for as long as possible. For instance, in a serial composition one will often not hear a note until all of the other 11 notes in the chromatic has been used.

Miles Davis (1921-1996) is an American composer and trumpeter in the jazz tradition. Davis was always innovating and experimenting, switching styles and breaking taboos of jazz music throughout his entire career. Listen to the first 10 minutes of the album at least.

Davis, Bitches Brew (1969)

Bitches Brew incorporates electronic elements into the jazz combo for the first time, using live processing on the trumpet and electric keyboard instruments extensively. Like Kontakte, Bitches Brew also takes advantage of recording techniques and the possibilities presented by working with magnetic tape, splicing recordings together as well as recording elements separately and adding them in during the post-production phase.

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2017) was an American composer and accordionist. Oliveros was an integral figure in early experimental electronic music and is now most closely associated with "deep listening," a term which began as a pun from an album of music recorded in an underground cistern in the 1980s, but has become widely used for a musical movement that mixes meditation, audience participation, improvisation, and ritual.

Pauline Oliveros navigated a male-dominated field with astounding success. She discusses some of these struggles in an op-ed for the New York Times in 1970 entitled "And don't call them lady composers."

Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) is an early electronic piece by Oliveros created at the San Franscisco center for Tape Music that she co-founded in 1960 and is now part of Mills College. The piece deconstructs a recording of Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly, and in the composers words "bids farewell not only to the music of the 19th century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex."

Alvin Lucier (b.1931) is an experimental American composer who often uses electronics in his compositions in idiosyncratic ways.

Lucier, I am Sitting in a Room (1969)

This work explores the resonance of a closed space. The music is process-based, where a person speaks the words "I am sitting in a room," which is then played back and re-recording in a feedback loop so that over time one only hears the resonant frequencies of the space itself.

Class 21 - Experimentalism

In this class we will touch upon a large number of pieces from the 1950, 1960, and 1970s. This music celebrates and values artwork that is generally austere and abstract in nature. The trust in science and forceful rejection of subjectivity and nationalism led to many musical "solutions" to how art should move forward after the second world war and in a global world.

This piece uses Cage's technique of altering the sound of the piano by inserting objects into the piano strings. This is known as "prepared piano," and since it's invention by Cage has become a fairly common practice among composers.

Joh Cage, 4'33" (1952)

Cage's infamous "silent" piece.

"Originally we had in mind what you might call an imaginary beauty, a process of basic emptiness with just a few things arising in it. . . . And then when we actually set to work, a kind of avalanche came about which corresponded not at all with that beauty which had seemed to appear to us as an objective.Where do we go then? . . . Well what we do is go straight on; that way lies, no doubt, a revelation. I had no idea this was going to happen. I did have an idea something else would happen. Ideas are one thing and what happens another."- John Cage, “Where are we going? And what are we doing?”, Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 220–222.

John Cage, Water Walk (1960)

In the 1950s, Cage was seeking a way to remove his ego from the compositional process and turned to chance operations via the I Ching. This is known as Aleatoric Music, and was hugely influential on other composers of the time and since, where the idea of indeterminacy in some form is often part of a piece of music.

Reich, Music for 18 Musicians (1976) (excerpt)

This piece is an example of American Minimalism, a movement pioneered by Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Minimalism is a returned yearning for simplicity in music and constitutes and interestingn analog with the visual art of Andy Warhol and the repettion in daily life as a result of mass production.

Consider this statement by the composer about the rhythm of this music: "Rhythmically, there are two basically different kinds of time occurring simultaneously in Music for 18 Musicians. The first is that of a regular rhythmic pulse in the pianos and mallet instruments that continues throughout the piece. The second is the rhythm of the human breath in the voices and wind instruments. The entire opening and closing sections plus part of all sections in between contain pulses by the voice and winds. They take a full breath and sing or play pulses of particular notes for as long as their breath will comfortably sustain them. The breath is the measure of the duration of their pulsing. This combination of one breath after another gradually washing up like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and mallet instruments is something I have not heard before and would like to investigate further. "

Can you hear these two rhythmic planes as described by Reich?

Various Recordings of My Favorite Things by John and Alice Coltrane.

Listen to the first few minutes of each of these recordings, placed in chronological order. Listen to the catchy melody from the first recording from 1961 and consider how it changes through the years towards the final recording from 1967. Are you able to recognize the song in the later recordings? Can you hear any transformation of Coltrane's approach to the song? How does Alice Coltranes version of the song compare to the various recordings of John Coltrane?

Class 22 - Microtonality

Microtonality is a general term that describes music that does not contain only the twelve-tones per octave on the piano. In this sense, most of the music we've looked at in class is microtonal, since the standard tuning of the piano wasn't fully place until the Romantic era although the roots of this tuning date back to the Baroque period in the West. Throughout the twentieth century there have been several group of composers interested in microtonal music and we will look at two of these movements today: French Spectralism and American Just Intonation.

An important movement in the second half of the twentieth century in music, spectralism focuses on the nature of sound, acoustics, and sound perception as a basis for composition. This work by preeminent French spectralist Gerard Grisey (1946-1998) is among the most celebrated and approachable works to come out of Spectralism. Spectral composers would say that spectralism isn't so much a unified histrical movement as an attitude toward music that puts the timbre of the instruments as a focus.

Partiels is a piece that explores the overtones of the lowest trombone note. Any note is in fact a combination of many pitches fused together and pitched instruments usually have tones that include parts of the overtone series (AKA harmonic series). At the beginning of this music we hear the low trombone note played forcefully and then the overtones of that note being held as a chord in the rest of the ensemble. In this way, the entire form of this composition is based upon the sound of the trombone.

La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano (1974)

In this piece La Monte Young retunes a piano to a microtonal scale based on Just Intonation. This music is influenced by Hindustani music, which La Monte Young studied and performed in parallel with his compositional activities. Many of the details regarding this piece are largely kept secret by the composer, who will not allow others to play the work unless they study with him for an extended period of time. A performance of The Well-Tuned Piano will take approximately five hours. Listen to at least the first fifteen minutes of this work.

Harry Partch, The Delusion of the Fury (1969)

Harry Partch is a unique figure in music composition insofar as the lengths he went to reinvent music from the ground up. After renouncing Western Classical music, Partch turned to Native American Song, Chinese Opera, Gamelon, and other musical traditions for inspiration. Partch invented his own orchestra of instruments and wrote almost exclusively for his own creations. All of his instruments are designed around his 43-note-per-octave scale in just intonation.

The Delusion of the Fury is Partch's final work, a piece of musical theater that tells two stories, a tragedy and a comedy that both speak to the futility of anger. Besides the various musical traditions mentioned above, Partch also looks back to the ancient Greeks and his musical-theater works are yet another attempt to recreate the power of the ancient Greek theater.

Partch lived through the depression as a hobo, travelling across the USA by hopping trains and working as he could find it. During these years he was exposed to American Folk music traditions and there is an interesting relationship between his very experiemnetal music and the folk music of the dust bowl and musicians like Woody Gurthrie and Pete Seeger. For a sampling of historical folk recordings please find the links below (optional), which are also posted in the sections of Ruth Crawford Seeger:

Class 23 - 21st Century

"Change has been divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways" - Rem Koolhaas, from Junkspace

David Bird will be teaching this class in my place today, discussing predominantly multimedia works by Johannes Kreidler, On Structure (Natacha Diels, Jesse Marino), and Óscar Escudero as well as Kate Soper's piece posted below.

Kate Soper, Only the Words... (2011)

In the words of the composer:

"I wrote Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say out of a determination to test my limits as a vocalist and performer and an itch to make something out of Lydia Davis' fabulously quirky, slyly profound texts. Writing as a composer/performer opens up the pre-compositional realm to lots of useful improvisatory tangents and fresh timbral discoveries, and working closely with flutist Erin Lesser led to many happy surprises that eventually made their way into the final score. Lydia Davis' words suggested an unhinged virtuosity and idiosyncratic, multi-layered musical reading that took me from screwball comedy to paired musical gymnastics: the flute becomes a kind of Iron Man suit for the voice, amplifying it to new planes of expressivity, intensity, and insanity as the two players struggle, with a single addled brain, to navigate the treacherous labyrinth of simple logic."

Listen to the relationship between the flute and the voice - how is it that thy interact and support, or not support, one another? How is the text set in this piece and what happens to the text as the piece goes on? Note the unusual moments of mechanical repetition that occur throughout the work - what effect do these have on you as a listener?